EOF encountered on read

I am a builder with log access on a mud running a custom rom derivative. There are a lot of errors listed in the logs and I'm getting a bit tired of seeing them and wondering if they are something wrong with the code or premature disconnect by players. Errors are all of this nature:

Mon Dec 6 07:32:03 2010 :: Sock.sinaddr: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
Mon Dec 6 07:32:09 2010 :: EOF encountered on read.

X's are obviously the IP address of a person attempting to connect to the mud. It appears quite a bit too much for my taste to shrug it off as people connecting then disconnecting. Can anyone tell me if this might be a code issue or am I just being paranoid and should relax? I would like to mention that while I can read some code, I can't really code.

A quick test shows that this is indeed the message you see when someone disconnects. So this might be considered "situation normal".

In your example it appears to happen 6 seconds after they connect, so they may have connected, read the banner screen, and decided not to play.

Also possibly it is a bot. Some sites (like mudconnector.com) routinely check out MUDs to see if they are still up, so they can report on it on their MUD status page.

So if you see this every hour or so it is probably a bot from a site like that just checking you are up (you could reverse-DNS lookup the IP address to confirm that).